High schoolers ID possible serial killer in 40-year-old Redhead Murders — reveal their findings on true crime podcast

[Sugar Cookie]

When Tennessee sociology and history teacher, Alex Campbell, decided to have his students try to solve a series of cold case slayings in the Spring of 2018, he never thought they’d end identifying a suspect — and landing a true crime podcast six years later.

In fact, he told his original group of students to be “prepared” to fail because top law enforcement officials had “worked on this for years and they haven’t gotten anywhere,” Campbell told The Post Wednesday.

All the Elizabethton High School students wanted was to identify one of the women and spread the word.

“My students have never ever disappointed me, I’ve given them some very hard things to do,” Campbell said in a phone interview. “But when they know they’re helping people, they work very hard.

“They never cease to impress me.”

Now those students are revealing their findings in a 10-episode podcast called Murder 101, sharing just how they obtained their evidence.

In 2018, more than 20 youngsters set out to find the connection between a long trail of redheaded, white women who had been killed in the surrounding area and how they might be related.

Dubbed, the Redhead Murders, the mystifying crimes involved up to 14 possible victims whose bodies were found abandoned along major highways in the South. It is believed some of these women were prostitutes.

What Campbell’s class originally set out to do was simple on paper: try to see how many of the women could be connected to a singular killer.

And in that one-semester sociology class, they agreed six of the victims were potentially connected to the same man, who they called the “Bible Belt Strangler.”

Those women have since been identified as Lisa Nichols, Michelle Inman, Tina McKenney-Farmer, Elizabeth Lamotte, Tracy Walker, and one – from DeSolo County – remains unidentified.

As part of the class, Campbell brought in former FBI behavioral analyst, Scott Barker, who told the students in order to confirm their connection they had to identify four things: timeframe, geography, an modus operandi – more commonly know as an “MO” – and a signature.

All six of the women were found between the years of 1983 and 1985, Campbell said, and in nearby areas and states. Three were from Tennessee and the others from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas. They also all died from close-up conflict and were dumped on highways.

One of the women was found nude and in a refrigerator, a student revealed on the podcast. Another was merely a skeleton when she was found by a driver after her body had decayed for months. A third was found over a guardrail, beaten and strangled and 10-12 weeks pregnant at the time.

What surprised Campbell the most was the “empathy” his students built for the dead women over the course of the semester.

“You as a teacher plan out what you want your students to learn,” the educator of 23 years said. “But you can never predict what the students really learn… And they learned so much more than I ever imagined.”

The “proudest” moment came when his students started referring to the victims as their “six sisters.”

Despite the women’s real families not pushing the cops, the students decided it was their job to keep fighting for their justice.

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High schoolers ID possible serial killer in 40-year-old cold case — reveal their findings on true crime podcast

In 2018, more than 20 youngsters set out to find the connection between a long trail of redheaded, white women who had been killed in Tennessee.

nypost.com

Michelle Inman and Tracy Walker

Tina McKenney-Farmer and Cynthia Louise Taylor

Elizabeth Lamotte

 

[420702]

I to suffer from Gingerphobia, also known as Gingervitis, but I don't feel the need to go Gen Z on other people.

 

[Sugar Cookie]

The sole surviving victim of the “Bible Belt Strangler” has spoken out for the first time to a Tennessee high school teacher — whose students helped crack the 40-year-old murder mystery.

The survivor, identified only as “L,” was attacked by Jerry Johns in the early 1980s, a deceased trucker investigators now believe may have been responsible for a string of unsolved killings that decade known as the Redhead Murders.

For the first time since her attack nearly four decades ago, she sat down with Elizabethton High School sociology teacher Alex Campbell to speak about her experience on the Murder 101 podcast.

“There’s no reason for me to be alive except the good Lord let me live,” she told Campbell on the iHeartRadio podcast in an exclusive clip obtained by The Post.

The grandmother said she was only able to come forward because she knew it would “save women’s lives.”

The survivor didn’t even know Johns had been tied to another murder until an FBI agent called her a “couple of years ago and told me,” she admitted.

“I didn’t even know Jerry Johns had died, but he called me and told me that they used DNA and proved that he killed this other girl,” she said.

Tina McKenney-Farmer was linked to Johns in 2018 through DNA evidence. The 20-year-old was found in December 1984 off Interstate 75 near Jellico, Tenn.

As for Johns, he died in prison in 2015 after being convicted of strangling a prostitute in Knox County, Kentucky in 1985.

“They questioned me when it happened,” the survivor admitted on the podcast about her own encounter with the suspected serial killer.

More murders continued to happen and the sole survivor noticed one of the girls “looked very similar to me.”

Farmer was one of the six victims Campbell’s 2018 class had connected as possible victims murdered by the same killer, with Johns as the suspect.

“There was a whole bunch of them that they questioned me about,” L said. “We sat at this big, huge, long table and there were photographs of all these women and some of them looked like photographs of me.

“There were dozens of girls that looked a lot like me, and they called them the Redhead Murders,” she said in the podcast, which is produced by KT Studios.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation later announced the late trucker as a suspect, but gave no credit to the students, which Campbell said he took harder than they did.

TBI is investigating to see if Johns can be tied to other Redhead Murders.

Campbell — who said he’s “poured his life” into the case trying to prove Johns is connected for the past six years —called L a “hero.”

“This is a terrible, tragic story for a lot of people and a lot of families, but if there’s a hero, it’s you,” he told her through tears.

“Your will to live is what got him arrested and kept him off the streets.”

Exclusive | Sole survivor of ‘Bible Belt Strangler’ speaks out after students helped crack cold case: ‘No reason for me to be alive’

“There’s no reason for me to be alive except the good Lord let me live,” the sole survivor, who is only listed as “L,” said.

nypost.com

 

[Taishobee]

So amazing!